Young Adult – Dull Boy

Avery tries hard to be dull. He wants his parents to stop having to worry all the time, to stop having to work extra hours at work to pay for the damaged property that seems to follow Avery around in a cloud of delinquency. But the destruction isn’t because Avery’s a bad guy, it’s because he’s still getting used to his own strength. It’s not generally normal to be able to bench press a car, or fly. Avery is many things, but dull is not one of them.

When Avery is approached first by an older woman, Cherchette, with powers who claims she wants to help him, and then by a group of teenagers with powers who claim that Cherchette is creepy and not to be trusted. But life is never that simple, and Avery has to make his own decisions about who to trust and what to do with his superpowers.

This was an entertaining, if slightly predictable, superhero/superpower story. The powers were not terribly surprising. Super strength, flight, ice, genius, even the cat girl; these are mostly standard superhero fare. The power of stickiness was a nice, not overly done touch. But a book does not have to be entirely new and shocking in order to entertain, and this book manages to come through on that front. I am looking forward to the sequel that was heavily foreshadowed at the end.